The Hazards of Slavery

Scott Spillman reviews Seth Rockman’s “Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery.”

By Scott SpillmanDecember 2, 2024

• History

THE HEART OF Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery, Seth Rockman’s new book, is not any particular Southern plantation but rather an early 19th-century textile company run by two aptly named brothers, Rowland and Isaac Hazard. Rowland was a genius with more than a touch of madness—“a sort of muted Quixotism impels me to attack the very windmills of metaphysics,” he once wrote—while Isaac suffered from chronic diarrhea but had a solid head for business; he could not contemplate Niagara Falls without wondering how much cloth its water power would produce. In the 1820s and ’30s, this odd couple led their company to the pinnacle of a newly important market segment: so-called “negro cloth,” named for the enslaved people who were its intended wearers.

But the Hazards were not based in the South, where so many of their wares were sold. Instead, the essence of Rockman’s book is expressed in the fact that the headquarters of the Hazard textile empire lay in Rhode Island. The Hazards’ business of supplying fabric for slaves employed towns full of free white families trying to claw their way into the middle class—or to cling desperately to it—at a time of rapid economic growth and change. Rockman follows the flow of goods from the Hazards and their free white employees through merchants in New York or Philadelphia to plantation owners and finally enslaved laborers, using those connections to illuminate the inner workings of early American capitalism.

Rockman, a professor of history at Brown University, is no stranger to this complex and often contradictory world. His first book, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (2008), made him a leader in the now-thriving field of the history of capitalism, which flourished after the financial crisis of 2007–08 revealed in real time that economic markets were not handed down by nature or God but were the products of human history, with all its manifest imperfections and failures. In Scraping By, Rockman focused on early 19th-century Baltimore, a boomtown port perched between the North and the South, with a focus on how a motley assortment of slaves, free Blacks, European immigrants, and native-born whites managed to make ends meet. As with other early entries in the resurgent history-of-capitalism field, the thrust of Rockman’s work was to cast “the market’s power as a force of human liberation” firmly into doubt. Far from being incompatible, slavery and wage work could coexist rather comfortably, he showed, as two forms of unequal and exploitative labor relations within a capitalist system.

Now, in Plantation Goods, Rockman is still concerned with many of the same topics that he previously examined across a few square blocks in Baltimore: the rise of wage work and factory labor, the relationship between slavery and capitalism, the emergence of a market society, the varieties of coercion under capitalism. But he has stretched his canvas to show how they played out over the entirety of the early 19th-century American landscape, from nascent industrial towns in New England to the feverish cotton frontier.

Rockman focuses most closely on the Hazards and their textile firm, but his book also sketches the broader world of goods—including shoes from Massachusetts and axes from Connecticut as well as hoes and palm hats—that emerging manufacturers in New England made for sale in the plantation South. A few conditions made this particular form of interregional trade possible. The South was growing rapidly in the generation or two after the American Revolution: the dispossession of Native Americans opened new lands for cultivation, the cotton gin enabled the spread of that staple across the interior, and the slave trade allowed for accelerated development. Alabama’s population, for example, increased a hundredfold in the first two decades of the 19th century. Its growth was the most dramatic, but states across the interior South saw such rapid settlement that people were soon pressing even farther west, with significant consequences in Texas and beyond.

In the North, meanwhile, a generation of conflict with Britain, culminating in the Embargo Act of 1807 and the War of 1812, led to the rise of American manufacturing capacity, which was maintained after the war with a series of protective tariffs. The new American manufacturers of textiles, shoes, and other goods often drew on the piecework labor of households across New England, giving their products a coarse quality that compared unfavorably with finer imports from Britain. But these goods found a ready market in the South, whose growth was generating a huge demand for cheap plantation provisions.

Rockman follows the production, distribution, and use of plantation goods from New England to New Orleans, showing in fine-grained detail exactly how capitalism operated at this point in American history and how its different components came together. One of his book’s most fascinating sections describes how the Hazards cannily expanded their market with money-back guarantees, invitations to Rhode Island summer resorts, and a readiness to take advantage of slavery’s swift rise in the Mississippi Valley. Rowland Hazard made his first sales trip to New Orleans in 1835, following a series of similar trips that his brother Isaac made to South Carolina in the 1820s, and visited hundreds of plantations, paying special attention to the large and reputable planters whose business would naturally bring others in its wake. (Rockman describes these big planters as “influencers.”) Though Rowland butchered the French names of his Louisiana clients, he confidently predicted that his firm’s production of cloth would soon triple. For more than a decade, until the late 1840s, he spent something like six months of each year on similar sales trips, connecting with old clients, collecting payments, and drumming up new business throughout the Deep South.

After detailing the production of plantation goods in the North and the means of their distribution to the South, Rockman ends up on the plantations themselves, where he is able to provide a solid overview of antebellum slavery through the lens of the goods he is tracking. As one might imagine, plantation owners and enslaved laborers alike could have strong opinions about plantation goods—owners because their purchases played a direct role in productivity and profitability, laborers because the quality of their tools and clothing went a long way toward determining their quality of life. Rockman shows that slaves complained enough about their clothing, shoes, tools, and other goods that their ideas filtered up to influence new designs. “They say the cotton pods prick out the wool and make holes in them,” Rowland Hazard reported from Mississippi, suggesting that a different type of fabric might work better in that region. In the absence of surviving physical artifacts, Rockman is astute at reading such evidence of slave complaints to tease out the nature of their equipment as well as something of their physical experience.

Yet such complaints were not merely practical in nature. In the wake of the revolution, when slavery was subjected to a real challenge growing out of Enlightenment philosophy and evangelical religion, slaveholders had to articulate stronger justifications of their practices. On one hand, this new defense took the form of defining Black people ever more firmly outside the circle of those who could enjoy the natural rights of liberty and equality. On the other hand, it took the form of ameliorating the physical conditions of slavery, encouraging the practice of Christianity, and promoting family formation (especially important after the end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808). This transformation, which took place partly in rhetoric and partly in reality, has been called the “domestication” of slavery, and it can be encapsulated in the familiar sentimental conceit of the planter as a benevolent father and the slaves as his perpetual children.

In this environment, Rockman shows, goods became not only practical tools for facilitating production and protecting investments in human property but also crucial means of enhancing one’s own reputation as a master while justifying slavery as superior to the free-labor alternative. Still, slaveholders tried to keep costs to a minimum, and evidence of material deprivation continued to provide abolitionists with plenty of ammunition. Rockman has a keen eye for the way slaveholders deployed distributions as a carrot to secure labor and loyalty, and he provides a fine account of the symbolic function of the typical ceremony in which the master himself would gather the slave community so that all could see him bestow blankets, cloth, and shoes as gifts.

Even as these strategies might enhance a master’s power in some ways, they also bound him in others, making him dependent on the gratitude of his enslaved laborers, the quality of his purchases, and the stability of the supply chain. Rockman notes that “shoddy” originally meant cheap cloth made from waste or recycled wool, and shoddy goods or late deliveries took on tremendous significance once material comforts became central to slaveholders’ reputations and justifications. Slaves recognized this and worked over decades to establish certain expectations for quantity and quality of provisions and frequency of distributions—“a struggle,” Rockman writes, “by which concessions had become customs and customs had become rights that enslaved people held dear and which slaveholders could not violate without incurring some cost.” Still, slaveholders always had the upper hand, and there were firm limits to what any strategy of slave complaint could achieve.

Following plantation goods allows Rockman to provide an effective tour of how both capitalism and slavery operated in the early United States. He also shows that the Northern and Southern economies were knit together more tightly than our typical caricature of the free North versus the slave South might suggest. All this is welcome and generally well done—occasionally overwrought in the typical academic way of worrying for paragraphs about points that don’t need to be proved, but clearly written and mostly free from phrases such as “dialogical and multidirectional.”

Yet Rockman falls short in his larger ambition to prompt “a rethinking of the sectional geography of a United States where the division between slavery and freedom would eventually start a Civil War.” Like many scholars of slavery and capitalism, he focuses so intently on establishing ties between North and South that he excludes the internal development of the Northern economy from his story. His book is notably light on numbers, but one gets the impression that plantation provisioning predominated only in fringe areas of the industrializing Northeast, while larger manufacturing centers saw the South as just one of many markets. As Rockman himself admits, the production of plantation goods did not power the Northern economy as a whole.

Rockman asserts that “an archipelago of New England communities became remote outposts of the American slaveholding regime,” but if that is true, then it is important to remember that those outposts eventually revolted. Although the South had expanded rapidly in the early 1800s and continued to grasp for new territory in the middle of the century, the real driver of American growth was moving to the Midwest, as Ohio became one of the most populous states in the Union and Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin all ballooned in size. Canals, railroads, and the Great Lakes bound this breadbasket of free farmers ever more tightly to the industrializing Northeast, giving rise to a single broad section whose political and economic interests increasingly aligned.

The market may not be a universal force for human liberation, as Rockman has rightly noted, but in this case, it combined with ideas about democracy and equality to give rise to a free labor ideology that was fundamentally opposed to slavery. The Hazards shifted in the late 1840s and ’50s from producing coarse negro cloth to making higher-quality shawls for a booming market of middle-class Northern women. The brothers soon joined the Republican Party, with Rowland Hazard attending the party’s national convention in 1860 to witness Abraham Lincoln’s nomination, and their workers also embraced the party’s antislavery appeal to the dignity of labor.

Rockman describes these developments, but they end up oddly buried in the middle of his book. Even though he is eager to invest every workplace disagreement with a political charge, he ultimately retreats from the fact that slavery became the subject of bitter political struggles that culminated in Southern secession and the Civil War. Instead, he ends with a romantic reverie about slave rebellion and John Brown’s pikes, and presents the Civil War’s main result as the creation of “four million liberated consumers,” as if that expressed the essence of the North’s antislavery commitment. His material history of plantation goods cannot explain the politics and ideas behind the broad Northern coalition that worked to end slavery and secure at least some rights for four million emancipated citizens.